Tuesday, 28 February 2017

Who Reviews The Heralds of Destruction Part Two by Tony J Fyler

The Third Doctor #2

Tony’s still loving the
practically perfect Third Doctor.

Call us fickle if you
like, but the Third Doctor comic-book may be our new favourite thing.

The first issue was that
rare and glorious experience – a comic-book that has the Poppins Factor, and is
practically perfect in every way. Most especially it evoked everything it
needed to evoke about the early seventies adventuring of the Third Doctor, Jo
Grant and the UNIT boys, while simultaneously updating the pace and punch of
its presentation to make it easily, greedily devourable by a New Who audience
of 21st century fans.

But one of the challenges
of a practically perfect first issue is where on Earth you take it from there.
It’s what bands know as the ‘difficult second album’ problem.

You want the headline? The
second album of the Third Doctor comic-book is as good as, though not better
than, the first. What it does is build on everything we loved in the first
issue and take it in exciting new directions, rather than simply trying to
re-deliver the same emotional beats of that debut issue.

After the cliff-hanger at
the end of issue #1, we knew there was going to be a certain amount of banter
in issue #2, and we knew roughly what form it would take – if it didn’t, it
wouldn’t strike the right nostalgic notes. Paul Cornell’s not a writer ever
likely to slip up on so obvious a banana skin, so the voices in this issue are
absolutely pitch perfect, without ever actually going over old ground. It’s
important to note that we’re not just talking about the voices of those
involved in the cliff-hanger – the Third Doctor and his unexpected guest. Jo
Grant here is especially believable, her dialogue en pointe for Katy Manning’s
squeaky, ever-optimistic portrayal, with just the right note of occasional ‘I’m
going to move the plot on while you bicker, if that’s quite all right.’ The
Brigadier too is very well observed, his signature combination of pomposity and
nous captured in the very bones of the storytelling, as well as in the dialogue
Cornell gives him.

A familiar villain
returns, whose presence was established in the first issue, but here they’re up
to old tricks – but with a new, 21st century Cornell twist, giving
their involvement that same sense of magic as was interwoven throughout issue
#1 – the combination of classicalism and modernity that manages to please the
pickiest of both worlds. And while there’s little development in terms of
understanding the actual storyline threat, what this issue does deliver are
some very solid Pertweean second-act thrills that work as a kind of
sub-adventure to show the nature, the speed, and the danger of that threat. The
micro-machines that combine to form a bigger whole, which seemed almost
incidental in the first issue alongside all the other highlights, here begin to
flex their metallic muscles, and the one-line description of their fundamental
nature – that they can convert anything they need into things like themselves
and add to their whole – gains a rather more cybernetic, or even Borgian
dimension when one of them touches Jo. Her descent into a mindless automaton is
frighteningly fast here, prompting the Third Doctor to go on an adventure where
he’s never been before – into what’s deliciously, psychedelically described
here as ‘Josephine Grant’s Groovy Unconscious.’

You can’t fail to love a
comic-book that takes you there, or calls it that. You simply can’t.

As well as providing an
object lesson in the kind of danger these micro-machines are capable of embodying,
turning organic matter into part of themselves just as easily as they do
pre-existing circuits, and delivering the kind of fantastical psycho-adventure
in which the Third Doctor rarely dabbled on-screen, this trip into Jo Grant’s
unconscious mind to fight the will of the machines gives artist Christopher
Jones and colourist Hi-Fi the chance to go absolutely psychedelia-wild and
crazy, and it’s a chance they embrace with all available hands. It’s the kind
of thing that stops the Third Doctor comic-book series being simply an exercise
in slavish reproduction of the look and feel of a certain era of Who, allowing
the art-wranglers to branch out and stamp a coherent, in-keeping but brand new
stylistic vision on the comic-books. In a way, it’s precisely the fact that we
now have forty years of distance and perspective on the time of the Third
Doctor that allows Jones and Hi-Fi to do this. If Doctor Who had gone
psychedelic and internalistic in the early seventies, it would probably have
confused the bejesus out of the audience living through that time. Looking back
on it, seeing Jo’s mindscape – which for all its initial hippy trippiness is
for the most part surprisingly ordinary – makes perfect sense as a
battleground. It’s a shift that actually took place much earlier in the viewing
audience’s consciousness, and a difference of approach that, for instance, has
the psychic battle between the Three Doctors and Omega rendered as more or less
a lot of eye-closing and frowning, and the battle between the Fourth Doctor and
the Deadly Assassin played out across a whole story of Matrix-induced
psychological trauma. That shift of approach to showing us the
battleground allows us to see the fight for control of Jo’s mind played out
against the backdrop of her unconscious, and allows Jones and Hi-Fi to give us
a lesson in the psychology of Ms Josephine Grant. While there’s a surface level
of hippy dippy grooviness to get through, that’s more or less Jo being a child
of her time. The actual buildings and landscapes of her unconscious are very
realistically rendered, with no cunning, no guile, no monsters of self-doubt
lurking down alleyways. Jo is exactly who she seems to be – the optimistic,
almost-innocent, passionate believer in causes, in doing some good, and in
protecting the good things and people of the universe against the bad. The
Third Doctor’s best friend. There’s nothing in her unconscious to frighten or
threaten either her or the Doctor – except the usurping force of the alien
machinery.

All of which leads us to a
double-whammy cliff-hanger which, while by no means as punch-the-air jubilant
as that which closed issue #1 is still absolutely solid from every angle as a
stake-raising, second episode moment of jeopardy, from which you genuinely
wonder whether our heroes can come back, while all the while knowing they
absolutely must.

Bottom line, run to your
comic-book store right now, get issue #2 of the Third Doctor, pre-order issues
#3, #4 and #5, and take the rest of the day off. You’ll have done a good thing,
so you’ll have earned it. Cornell’s name is pretty much a guarantee of quality,
and matched with Jones and Hi-Fi, he’s delivering us the Third Doctor we
remember, but with a 21st century punch.

Oh – and Easter eggs. The
way the classic villain escapes is one, but there’s a lovely additional layer
of fun to be had with a comment from Jo, and the Third Doctor’s response, that
both explains one of the most skin-crawling phrases from the New Who world, and
allows Cornell and the Classic fans to have a bit of a giggle with the short
shrift the Third Doctor gives it. At the same time though, in explaining where
the phrase comes from, there’s plenty of soggy sentiment to be retrospectively
wrung from the later Doctors using it, in tribute to their one-time best friend
when they were undergoing a painful period of exile. Paul Cornell, ladies and
gentlemen; having it both ways, and delivering it both ways, to please
absolutely all of the people, all of the time. Class. Pure class.